United States has more total Covid-19 cases than China | Hacker News Reader

United States has more total Covid-19 cases than China

worldometers.info

17 pointsbillyhoffman16 comments

No sane person believes the numbers coming out of China. As countries start testing more for the virus the numbers will continue to grow. Very easy for a countries line to flat line if you don't test for it.

But I know people in the region I work with on a daily basis and by their account there are no masses of people dying everywhere and some of restrictions on movement were lifted.

If the infected population grew exponentially China would be flooded with bodies long ago but that does not seem to be what is happening.

China might not be believable in many things but it is difficult to hide millions of people sick or dying.

Points taken. The CCP controls all media, the story, and the narrative. I personally don't see the infected nor the deaths in the US, but this information is disseminated through via media who gets there data from the CDC and other government agencies. The CCP hide the details about the outbreak for some time and only got out via individuals who broke the news at severe fear of being punished by the CCP.

I do work with people in China, who doesn't these days, right? They report the same thing I see which is I don't see the infected or deaths directly, unless working in health care. My industry is tech so the individuals that I work with will not have first hand accounts. They only know what the CCP informs the public and we all know it is a well formulated narrative.

I believe we will never know the true depths until the CCP is finally overthrown and details are released after that time.

I find this focus on CCP not healthy for the learning process. Certainly something to take into account but your preoccupation with it seems to be excessive.

There seems to be no reason currently to disbelieve Chinese numbers. They are encumbered by unknown, possibly very significant measurement errors, for sure, but so are european or american ones.

Due to nature of exponential growth I think it is unrealistic to believe that the virus grows rampant. All signals point to Chinese economy coming back from the nap and I find it difficult to believe that would be happening if internally Chinese state was still struggling to get the virus under control.

Just use Occam's razor. The simplest explanation, given no facts to point otherwise, is that Chinese state used its power and control over population to actually successfully push back the spread of the virus.

Check the reports coming from Italy/Spain that the Chinese test kits they've received are only 30% accurate. Testing 10 known infected the kits reports 3 are infected, and 7 as not.

So if China is using similar kits, which is what is supposedly happening, they could have almost 3x the cases they are reporting.

Or, they are shipping inaccurate tests to rest of world to "help"

Either situation is very concerning.

https://www.businessinsider.com/coronavirus-spain-says-rapid...

It does not matter much whether the tests are 30% accurate. See... this is exponential growth. Due to its nature it will overrun any linear factors in a short time.

What if the reported Chinese numbers are only 30% of reality compared to US numbers? If you understood the nature of exponential growth you would know it will take just about 4 days for US to have three times the numbers China has.

It currently only takes US about 8 days to increase the number of cases tenfold (see here: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/) which means 4 days to get 3 times increase.

What really matters is to get people to stop moving around and spreading the virus.

This is extremely worrying. No other country has seen such a sharp increase in COVID-19 infections like the USA. On top of that, the death rate is also very high. And this is just getting started...

From where I sit USA is doing not nearly enough to prevent the spread.

Here in Poland the actions started very early when there was less than half a dozen cases when all schools were closed and now with about a thousand cases we have full curfew with stiff fines (about $10k) for people moving or meeting without sufficient reason.

Even though reaction was quite fast there was no sufficient testing of all suspected cases as it was done in South Korea and it is expected we will have at least tens of thousands of cases.

If you look at the graphs of cases on https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ you will see the logarithmic graphs for Poland very slowly flattening which means the growth is slowing down while the one for US is still growing strong completely unchecked.

It took from March 14th to March 25th (11 days) to get last 10x increase in Poland, the previous 10x increase from March 8 to March 14th (6 days).

In US, the numbers are March 17th to March 25th (8 days) while the previous 10x increase was from March 9th to March 17th (also 8 days).

So it seems while Poland started faster it now has slower doubling rate while also having much less portion of population infected.

Now compare this to current situation in Italy where the last 10x increase took from March 8th to March 25th which is 17 days and you will see that US situation is way worse than in Italy as the doubling rate is not only not slowing down but the exponent is over two times higher. During the time it took Italy to increase cases 10x the same number increased over 100 times in US.

I don't have a way to connect the government actions to results but I also understand without the actions the virus would spread unconstrained.

Seems like that flattened curve is still going to be pretty tall.

The US healthcare system, although expensive, is the most developed in the world. They can accommodate it.

They're already getting hammered by "apocalyptic" conditions in New York. We can not "accommodate" it at all.

Maybe I am missing the sarcasm, but what makes you say that? Most research on the topic seams to indicate that this is not the case.

> The OECD has compiled data on dozens of outcomes and process measures. Across a number of these measures, the U.S. lags behind similarly wealthy OECD countries (those that are similarly large and wealthy based on GDP and GDP per capita). In some cases, such as the rates of all-cause mortality, premature death, death amenable to healthcare, and disease burden, the U.S. is also not improving as quickly as other countries, which means the gap is growing.

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality...

How can markets rally continuously on news like this???

No idea! It’s like everyone is looking at this as a “money problem” and throwing a bunch of stimulus at it, instead of taking it for what it actually is—an unprecedented health issue in a completely unprepared country.

Does China report accurately and honesty?

No, of course not. The CCP is very well versed on tactically releasing information to benefit themselves.

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